ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the regulation of homosexuality writ large as a process of state as part of the literature on the deployments of modernity as racial trope in the West and as a kind of self-righteousness among activists anticipating inevitable progress toward universal rights - theirs being a 'sexual modernization theory'. Taking sexuality and gender as both productive and controlling because these systems are produced as the modern, it examines them as they serve the state through either repression or rights. In essence, the state's motivation is not homophobia per se, but an array of processes of 'homosexualization' as statecraft within the state's sovereign interest in rule as a process of war. The chapter also examines the saturation of modernity with state homophobia that gives life to the very notion of homosexuality it seeks to abort. The values privileged within and through the categories of homophobia more often presage or at least trace the rise of LGBT rights.
